There was a time in America when the weather was merely the topic of idle conversation. Now, it's big news, the subject of all-hands-on-deck media coverage, and the results are appalling. A pattern has set in: The press hypes the peril supposedly posed by a hurricane or heat wave or blizzard, politicians overreact, and the public suffers.
All this was played out as Hurricane Floyd approached the East Coast last week. The networks and cable news went wild. Dan Rather deployed himself in the storm's path. The Weather Channel set records for viewership. President Clinton rushed back early from a trip to New Zealand, then preemptively declared a disaster area in Florida and Georgia before the hurricane had even arrived.
Mandatory evacuations were then ordered, and three million people hit the road. Did the fact that almost all of this turned out to be unnecessary cause any chagrin? Hardly. In fact, Vice President Gore boasted that it was the biggest peacetime evacuation in history. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives shut down, and the New York Stock Exchange closed early. Schools took a holiday. Government workers were instructed to stay home.
Yes, Floyd brought heavy rain and high winds along the coast, which caused flooding and power outages. But it was not the storm of the century. So maybe we should all calm down, starting with the media. Before 1996, storms never made the top ten list of stories on the network evening news shows. In 1996, bad weather rose to number eight, then to five in 1997. And though the weather wasn't twice as bad in 1998, the number of stories more than doubled. This year, the weather -- not impeachment or Kosovo or Littleton -- may well end up as the most heavily covered news topic of the year. Small wonder that officials, who follow the cameras, step forward with emergency measures that more often than not are premature, ill-advised, and draconian.